When Frank walked in on Dee and Erik cuddling in her bed one afternoon, he didn’t ask any questions. Dee said Frank grabbed Erik by his shirt and threw a punch that Erik ducked. She said Erik tripped and fell as he tried to get out the door, and Frank kicked Erik in the gut and the neck, and pinned him down by holding his knees tight against Erik’s hips. Dee called me at work; I was gently erasing pencil from some very delicate yellowing paper. Dee was hysterical and barely making sense. In the background, I heard the soft, sick sounds of one body caving into another. I thought of the wound on her ribs. I told her to call the police; I tried to use my calm voice. It didn’t work. The nub of my eraser tore a hole through the paper in front of me.
“Dammit,” I whispered.
“Please,” she screamed at me. “Help.”
When I got off work, I drove to the dorm, but there was no sight of Dee, or Frank, or Erik. The angry hall monitor who’d chastised me before paced in front of Dee’s door. Pastel paper flowers crunched underneath her shoes. I was about to ask her where they’d gone, but she beat me to it.
“Dee went in the ambulance with that other guy.” The girl lowered her voice. “The gay one.” She seemed impressed with herself for saying the word.
I drove to the closest hospital and checked in at the ER’s reception. A tired nurse motioned down the hallway behind her. There were stretchers lining the hallway and people standing over these stretchers waiting for rooms. Some of these people were very sick; some of them were handcuffed to the metal rail of their bed. Erik and Dee were curled up in one of these beds together. They were holding hands. I felt a pang of jealousy and then a wave of nausea. I tried to shake it off.
Erik had his eyes closed. His face had already begun to swell up badly, so I almost didn’t recognize him. When I got close, Dee narrowed her eyes to slits and put her finger up against her lips. “They gave him some morphine,” she whispered. “He’s dozing now.”
“Are you okay?” I asked her. I took her free hand into mine and kissed it.
“Frank thought we were fucking.”
“He’s an idiot,” I said. “Erik tried to tell you . . .”
Dee bristled. “You’re an idiot,” she croaked. “You’re the one who suggested he stay with me!” The tone of her voice was changing fast. She tried to take her hand away, but I kept it and squeezed hard.
“You said it was okay!”
She paused and breathed a labored breath like she was trying to calm herself down. Her tone stayed strained, though. “Look at him,” Dee said. I couldn’t. I looked at Dee’s thin pink fingers threaded through my own. “Look,” she said again. I did and I felt the nausea rising in me again.
“We have to fix this.” She gently released Erik’s hand and used her opposite hand to pry my fingers away from her own, one by one. It hurt. She took Erik’s hand back up and buried her face in his neck. I’m ashamed now to admit I didn’t tell her that from where I stood, it looked like she was the one who needed to fix things. She needed to get rid of Frank.
That night there were fifteen-foot waves off the shore of Bradford Beach. When I picked Leif up at Ambrosia, I told him about the waves before I mentioned anything about Erik. I didn’t know how he would react. It occurred to me that this meant I didn’t know Leif well at all. He wanted to see the waves, so we drove to the break wall, but there were fire trucks and neon-orange fencing blocking us from the beach. The waves had begun to wash up into the street, and the officials were working on blocking that off too. A policeman waved us back. He came up to Leif’s car and rapped his knuckles on the window.
“We’re closing this all off until the waves die down,” he told us. “I’m going to have to ask you to turn around.” He shone his flashlight into our car and then pointed it out toward Lake Michigan, where the black waves ate the light. “I’ve never seen waves like this,” he admitted.
“We just wanted to see them, Officer,” I said.
He nodded. “Leave your car here,” he whispered conspiratorially. “You can walk to the edge of the fence if you want.”
Leif was ecstatic. We hurried out of his car. The lake was so loud it drowned the noises of the city: the sirens, and the cars, and the groans of buses and trains, and people everywhere making it known they were unhappy. It was late, but there was some purple light left in the sky, so we could see the waves as they collected themselves high and then crashed heavy on the white rocks of the break wall. There was a desperate energy to the scene, and it had the effect of making me want to confess. But to what? I looked at Leif, his face wind-whipped and tired from the slow slog of his shift at Ambrosia, and I told him I was sorry. He took up my hand, maybe because there was no one to see. It was hot and wet.
“For what?” he asked.
“Erik’s been staying at Dee’s. Frank found the two of them there together and got the wrong idea. He beat Erik up bad. He’s in the hospital.”
One of the waves rushed through the holes in the orange fencing and kissed our feet. The water still felt like winter. I shivered, and Leif, to my surprise, collected my body in his arms.
“You can’t fix people,” he whispered. I wished he would speak loudly; I could barely hear him.
“What do you mean?”
I tried to pull away from him, but he held me against his body. Our feet were soaked.
“Listen to me,” he begged. “You can only ever make it worse.”